New Yorks anti-cop forces have roared back to life, thanks to a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man a week ago. The press is once again fawning over Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Charles Barron, and sundry other hate-mongers in and out of city government as they accuse the police of widespread mistreatment of blacks and issue barely veiled threats of riots if they do not get justice.

The allegation that last weekends shooting was racially motivated is preposterous. A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that a party leaving the club was armed and about to shoot an adversary. When one of the undercovers identified himself as an officer, the car holding the party twice tried to run him down. The officer started firing while yelling to the cars occupants: Let me see your hands. His colleagues, believing they were under attack, fired as well, eventually shooting off 50 rounds and killing the driver, Sean Bell. No gun was found in the car, but witnesses and video footage confirm that a fourth man in the party fled the scene once the altercation began. Bell and the other men with him all had been arrested for illegal possession of guns in the past; one of Bells companions that night, Joseph Guzman, had spent considerable time in prison, including for an armed robbery in which he shot at his victim.

The more I hear about crime in the big cities the more I wonder what has happened to the real men in our society.

We do not tolerate this type of crap anywhere near our home in the sticks.I firmly believe if groups of men would police those city neighborhoods and take out the trash it would be cleaned up real quick.

Remember -- you're talking about a city that has basically functioned as a police state for decades. A 911 system wasn't enough in New York City, so they instituted a 311 system to deal with calls from city residents trying to find their way through the city government's bureaucratic maze for "non-emergency" situations.

At any rate, there is no reason to expect anything remotely resembling "real men" in a city that was one of the first to ban smoking in private establishments and is soon going to impose dietary restrictions on restaurants, too.

26
posted on 12/04/2006 1:08:57 PM PST
by Alberta's Child
(Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)

We do not tolerate this type of crap anywhere near our home in the sticks.I firmly believe if groups of men would police those city neighborhoods and take out the trash it would be cleaned up real quick...

Well, you do have meth labs out in the sticks along with all varieties of growers.

A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that a party leaving the club was armed and about to shoot an adversary.

They had been undercover for months trying to bust this club with no results. This was the last night of their operation and at 4am, they finally got the bad element at the club who were just there for a bachelor party?

As far as the supposed gun, one of the cops claims one of the eight men at the club said something like "Yo, get my gun" which indicated he wasn't carrying the weapon. And five of the eight men were not in this car. Furthermore, these men were shot a block away from the club, clearly having no intention of engaging in illegal activity at the club or having committed any crime while at the club. Beyond that, the undercovers had not alerted the other police in the neighborhood that they were about to make a bust or had probable cause for an arrest.

There's more to the story than that, there was something about a prostitute and the undercover was going to arrest her outside. Also, there had been one man in the club with a gun. I don't believe he was involved in the subsequent event.

I'd consider the Diallo case a special circumstance for the reason you mentioned (the fact that he was an illegal alien makes his demise pretty much inconsequential for the most part). The other two cases involved undercover police officers dealing with "civilians" who may or may not have known that they were undercover police officers.

The Dorismond case was particularly instructive in the way it highlighted the potential idiocy of an undercover operation . . .

There is no way to justify a police shooting of a person who assaulted an undercover officer who tried to sell drugs to him. Remember -- the follow-up investigation of that incident revealed that Dorismond probably had no idea the guy was an undercover cop.

34
posted on 12/04/2006 1:20:42 PM PST
by Alberta's Child
(Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)

New York City has about 40,000 police officers today, which means the city's police force -- in a city that covers only 321 square miles -- is almost one-third the size of the entire U.S. military contingent in Iraq today.

In addition, the fact that constitutional rights are abrogated in New York City as a matter of course (see Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) would seem to support my contention that the place is a police state.

36
posted on 12/04/2006 1:24:29 PM PST
by Alberta's Child
(Can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep?)

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